Evaluate factors, which are held to contribute to boys? underachievement.
Underachievement in schools has been very popular to many academics for many years in the field of education and other fields such as psychology and sociology. Until recently the main groups seen to be underachieving are working class pupils, pupils from certain ethnic backgrounds and girls, boys have been thought to be the high achievers. In the seventies girls were seen to perform below boys, they did less well in the old GCE examinations and the amount of girls that went on to further education was significantly less than that of boys. They tended to have a very narrow curriculum and took traditionally girls subject such as home economics and humanities subjects and boys tended to opt for the more technical and academic subjects such as maths and science. However things began to change and parents, schools and girls themselves became increasingly aware of what they could achieve.
Boys + Girls (EP)
Teachers 2: Back to School
Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys (book)Governments and schools began to make conscious efforts to remove the imbalance, for example the National Curriculum was introduced to all schools in 1988 and schools set up equal opportunities programmes.
Today however it is now the concern of many academics that boys are underachieving in schools. The underachievement begins at an early age, at key stage 1 eighty five per cent of girls achieved levels two or above and over thirty per cent achieved above level three compared to only seventy two per cent of boys achieving levels two or above and only twenty per cent achieving level three. ?Girls were on average a quarter of a level higher than boys?In English, equating to six months progress.? (Oxburgh sited on www.practicalparent.org)). Although boys were slightly ahead in maths and science there was no significant difference. Girls were even further ahead in...